I’m looking for a virus program that I can put on a safe, inviolate CD and run in case my computer gets infected, without fear of the virus being able to eat the scanner. Norton’s virus program can be run off its installation CD, but that would be using a horribly out of date definition file that wouldn’t have a prayer of catching any modern virus.
I see that being run from the command line is listed as a feature of the Pro version, which would hopefully mean that there aren’t any registry entries involved in its operation, but it might still stick files in the windows directory or somesuch when installed, which means it wouldn’t run if the virus ate them. So, does anyone know if Avast can be run from an isolated location without any registry entries?
You need a Windows PE license for that. You could buy the Avast BartCD, but it is a bit expansive for use normal users. The only “free” Builder of a PE cd is not avaible anymore( http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder ). A other way was to create one for Linux. There are several livecds avaible( http://www.knoppix.net/ ), but you have to include a scanner for your own and you only have NFTS read access no write access.
It doesn’t necessarily need to be a bootable CD, unless there’s something out there that can actually FUBAR an executing virus scanner and keep it from running. The CD would just make for an absolute virus-free platform to be running the scanner from.
Still, it was the tiring work of two minutes to Google my way to a copy of that PE builder ;D so if all else fails, I could just make a boot CD and stick the program on that.
It is a really fine tool! It works fine with Mcafee, drweb and rav-antivirus.and several other tools.